Questions for the NCCCS Presidential Search

Earlier this year, Dr. Jeff Cox, president of the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS), announced his intention to retire in June 2026. Consequently, the NCCCS must now find its tenth chief executive of the 21st century and its seventh (including acting and interim leaders) of the last decade.

Below, the Martin Center lists several questions that state decisionmakers should pose to anyone who wishes to run the 58-campus system. As an October press release reminds us, the NCCCS comprises “30,000 employees serving more than 600,000 students annually [with] an operating budget approaching $2 billion.” The choice of its next president is a crucial one.

What should one look at to determine whether a community-college system is succeeding? How should the NCCCS measure success?

The community-college system’s Data Dashboard is a labyrinthine collection of numbers gauging seemingly every educational-performance metric on the planet. Interested parties can read about the NCCCS’s apprenticeship rates and headcounts, its student-enrollment numbers by program area, its “Basic Skills Measurable Skill Gain Rate,” its graduates’ median quarterly earnings, or its high-school dual-enrollment outcomes—and on the list goes. Given so many choices, what should one look at to determine whether a community college, or a community-college system, is succeeding?

The educational marketplace is changing, and institutional assessment will necessarily have to evolve with it. One popular answer is the postsecondary two-year completion rate, one of many metrics prized by the statewide education commission myFutureNC. At present, North Carolina is surpassing, at 50 percent, its 2030 goal of a 45-percent completion rate at its community colleges. One wonders, however, if such a metric honors the actual facts on the ground where teaching and learning are concerned.

To begin with, an institution’s completion rate matters only if academic standards are upheld. Let me pass everyone, and I will give you a completion rate of 100 percent. Far more germane, however, is the reality that not every community-college student needs or wants to graduate. As Peter Riley Bahr made clear in his 2016 study of community-college return on investment, “students who leave community college without a credential have not necessarily failed to achieve their goals or dropped out.” They may be skills-builders, getting what they need from a course of study and then rationally applying their efforts elsewhere.

The next president of the NCCCS needn’t disregard traditional measures of educational performance and value. But he or she must understand that the educational marketplace is changing, and institutional assessment will necessarily have to evolve with it.

What does it mean to “accelerate modernization”?

As the aforementioned press release makes clear, state decisionmakers are looking for a leader who can “accelerate modernization,” an effort explicitly tied to “workforce partnerships” and institutions that “move at the speed of business and innovation.” Yesterday’s community colleges were time- and cost-effective ways to tackle one’s general-education requirements before moving on to Four-Year U. Today’s community colleges partner with Google.

While few would wish to go back in time, it is nevertheless the case that community colleges remain, for many students, the primary source of postsecondary liberal-arts education. Although further “modernization” of the system is surely desirable, how can we ensure that traditional values and goals aren’t left by the wayside?

What is dual enrollment’s role in North Carolina’s educational pipeline?

North Carolina’s dual-enrollment program for high-school students, Career and College Promise (CCP), offers tens of thousands of North Carolinians a head start on postsecondary education. Should eligibility for the program be tightened, loosened, or left alone?

Specifically, CCP offers not only high-school juniors and seniors but “select freshmen and sophomores” the opportunity to earn college credit. Can 14-year-olds realistically meet the expectations of an authentic college curriculum? Once enrolled, most students must maintain a 2.0 GPA in order to stay in the program. Given the realities of grade inflation, is such a mark too low to meaningfully deter unacceptable academic performance?

As a source of financial and educational value for North Carolinians, CCP is clearly a program of significance. What needs to be done to ensure that it is not also a driver of lowered classroom expectations?

How can we ensure that traditional values and goals aren’t left by the wayside? Should any North Carolina community colleges be closed or merged? 

The NCCCS’s 58 colleges serve all 100 counties in North Carolina. That doesn’t mean, of course, that every county has or needs its own institution. While the system’s promotional materials currently brag that “nearly every North Carolina resident can drive to their nearest community college in 30 minutes or less,” developments in online learning may eventually render such metrics less important. Michigan, similar in population but far larger in size, has only 28 public community colleges. Ohio has only 22. Is the Tar Heel State’s more generous selection sacrosanct, or should policymakers consider culling the herd when doing so makes financial sense?

As a candidate, are you here for the long haul? What about AI?

What is more important: that NCCCS students master basic English and math or that they learn how to prompt ChatGPT and other large language models? Ideally, a community-college graduate will have learned to do both by the time he leaves campus. In the real world, effort dropped in one basket means the other basket is less full.

As suggested above, a tension exists between workforce development and the fundamentals of postsecondary education. Artificial intelligence will only exacerbate this divide. To what extent should institutions, programs, and faculty be encouraged to shift their focus to the development of AI skills? Or is AI still, at least in part, an impediment to actual student learning?

Is this a destination job?

Few candidates will have failed to notice that UNC System president Peter Hans was once the chief executive of the NCCCS. Is leading the state’s community-college system a stepping stone to something grander, or is it, to borrow a phrase often applied to college coaching vacancies, a “destination job”?

Like all unwieldy bureaucracies, the NCCCS would benefit from a period of stability following more than a decade of executive-level churn. As a candidate, are you here for the long haul? Or will you have an eye on the professional horizon from day one? For students, employers, employees, and North Carolina taxpayers, the answer matters.

Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.